Kavita Gupta Sabharwal is the Founder and Director of Neev Schools and Neev Academy, Bengaluru, and a leading voice in reimagining education in India.
With a background spanning biotechnology, corporate strategy, and finance, she transitioned into education to address gaps in early childhood and holistic learning.
An alumna of Mumbai University and Harvard Business School, Kavita has built Neev into a respected IB continuum that emphasizes inquiry, reading, real-world engagement, and the development of the whole child beyond exams.
Key Takeaway:
Education Must Be About the Whole Child, Not Just Academic Outcomes
Education, at its core, is not an exercise in ranking children through grades and examinations. While assessments play an important role in opening doors to future opportunities, they are only one part of a much larger ecosystem. True education must nurture intellectual curiosity, emotional resilience, ethical grounding, and social awareness. By focusing on the “whole child for the whole world,” schools can prepare learners to navigate uncertainty, complexity, and change—not just perform well in standardized systems.
Lifelong Learning Is Built Through Habits, Not Instructions
Children do not become lifelong learners because they are told to learn—they become learners by observing and internalizing habits. Reading widely, listening deeply, exploring ideas beyond textbooks, and pursuing knowledge driven by curiosity are essential. When adults position learning as something finite or “good enough,” children adopt the same mindset. Cultivating self-driven learning habits ensures that children continue growing long after formal schooling ends.
The Human Teacher Remains Central, Even in an AI-Driven World
Despite rapid advances in artificial intelligence, meaningful learning still depends on human interaction. AI can process data and generate responses, but it cannot read a classroom, sense emotional shifts, or adapt intuitively to how different children engage with ideas. Experienced teachers bring judgment, empathy, and lived insight into the learning space—guiding not just what students learn, but how they think, question, and connect with knowledge.
India’s Education System Is Earning Renewed Trust and Confidence
The long-held belief that global success requires leaving India is gradually changing. As India’s economic opportunities expand and high-quality institutions grow in number and depth, students are increasingly choosing to build careers and networks within the country. This shift reflects not only improved academic options, but a broader confidence in India’s capacity to nurture talent, innovation, and leadership for the future.
Curriculum Choices Should Align With Family Values, Not Trends
Choosing an educational board is less about the child’s abilities and more about parental clarity. Every education system carries implicit values—about competition, collaboration, discipline, creativity, and success. When parents choose schools aligned with their own belief systems, they are better equipped to support their children through moments of struggle. A steady parental presence creates psychological safety, which is essential for genuine learning.
Technology Cannot Replace the Depth of Human Thinking
While technology offers efficiency and access, it also tempts learners toward shortcuts. Deep understanding requires sustained cognitive effort, the ability to wrestle with complex ideas, and comfort with uncertainty. Over-reliance on technology risks weakening these muscles. Education must therefore consciously balance digital tools with practices that encourage deep reading, critical reflection, and original thought.
Real Learning Emerges When Education Engages With the Real World
Learning becomes transformative when it is connected to lived realities. Inquiry-based projects, field experiences, research, and exposure to diverse perspectives help students understand the world as interconnected systems rather than isolated subjects. When learning begins with authentic questions—rather than predetermined answers—students develop ownership of knowledge, ethical awareness, and the confidence to navigate real-world challenges.
Chethan K (Host): Hi ma’am. Welcome to Edexlive.
Kavita Gupta Sabharwal (Guest): Thank you.
Chethan K (Host): Neev Academy is now recognised as one of the top IB schools globally. As the Founder and the Director, how do you think your vision and philosophy has contributed to the global recognisation? What makes Neev’s IB programme different from most traditional or exam-driven IB schools?
Kavita Gupta Sabharwal (Guest): Education is much more than exams, much more than grades.
We recognise that it's about educating the whole child, and it's about educating the whole child for the whole world. That's how we look at learning at Neev.
One of the most exceptional things that we do is we travel across the country. We do a lot of reading on knowledge, issues, which is outside of the curriculum.
That's how we look at the whole child for the whole world. It's nice to know that we are doing ok with the academics as well, but it's important to never lose sight of that.
The school is much larger than academics.
Academics are an important component because they are how children enter, and assessments and grades are important. That's what creates an entrance for students to the next level.
We can't lose sight of that. A child is not an alternate, but we recognize that either our thinking in education is broken and is problematic.
You have to have a both–and thinking in education, and that's what Neev is about.
Chethan K (Host): The Neev Literature Festival has become a flagship event promoting literacy and love for reading. What simple things can parents do to make reading a family habit today?
Kavita Gupta Sabharwal (Guest): I think what's important to recognize is why do we do this? Why do we host the Neev Literal Fest?
Often we propagate this thought process for children that education is something that's being done unto you.
And when you ask children that what is the best way that you learn, the kids will often say that the best way we learn is from the teacher who's in the classroom.
But the teacher is only one resource for learning. How do you get children to recognize that the world is changing so fast and you cannot be... it's not only one way of learning.
You also can't think that learning is something that needs to be done unto you. You need to be a volunteer on that journey.
Otherwise, you are constantly looking at what is enough and what is good enough, and then you want to stop there.
Young children don't do that. Older children, as they grow older, they start to do that.
They start to look at what is the learning that they can just stop at. Parents need to recognize that if they propagate that kind of thinking—parents and all adults need to recognize that—we play a role in propagating that thinking that the learning that we tell you is enough is enough to succeed in the world.
If we can make children instead learn the habits of being a lifelong learner through their own habits of curating reading, through their own habits of listening to podcasts and things like that that go way beyond just their pure academics, by identifying how they like to learn, by identifying what they like to learn, that is going to make them a lifelong learner, and that's important.
Chethan K (Host): What makes experienced teachers essential to quality education, even in today's AI era?
Kavita Gupta Sabharwal (Guest): Teachers are always going to be valuable. It's not a question of this era or that era.
The questions that are being asked now and the debates exist—the industry that is creating AI or building AI wants the world to think that AI is thinking.
But the fact is that AI is not thinking. AI essentially, are the strongest developments in AI are the LLMs, the large language models—they are essentially sitting on top of language and data which exists in the world, and they are bringing that together faster than people who are not adequately informed can do, but they can't bring that together in a different way.
They will bring it together in predetermined ways. That's what AI is doing right now.
That's outside of... I think the role of a teacher in being able to help students realise what AI is capable of, what AI is not capable of, is one side of it.
But an experienced teacher in the classroom is much more than that. An experienced teacher in the classroom is about having the heuristics, for example, of how do students learn best, are students engaged in that learning, to see that conversation that happens and quickly—it's like communication between two individuals.
The Turing test was actually what was defined way back to say that can computers take the place of humans, and the argument was not there, and that still exists today.
And that's because the capability of the interaction, the human interaction, and what that does to build things and to react to each other is not what a machine can do. You're not really communicating—you're communicating in preset ways.
You are communicating in ways that the machine has known that this is the communication that has happened in the past and therefore.
I think the role of a teacher is much larger than that. The role of a teacher is much larger than content. It is to see: are the children developing skills? Are the children having the right disposition to learning? Is this learning working for every child?
To constantly differentiate learning is the big job of a teacher and to make learning work for every child is the job of a teacher. Teachers are not deliverers of content. They're much more than that, and that job is not going out anywhere.
Chethan K (Host): India’s biggest minds still look abroad for higher studies. What will it take for Indian education to inspire the same confidence as Ivy League universities?
Kavita Gupta Sabharwal (Guest): That's changing very fast. It's all about where the economic growth is, even today.
If you look at where that economic growth is, where the innovation is, America today is so much ahead of the rest of the world. But we hear often and we read often how China is catching up with that. Development is the jobs of the future today, even today, are there in America. But that opportunity is going away. India is rising with that, the change is happening pretty fast.
If you look at the 1980s, the number of people from the IITs that were leaving to go abroad immediately after they finished their engineering were possibly 85%. But last year, or I think even the year before that, 83% of the IIT Delhi class stayed in India.
Education is often about where you expect to be after doing your education, work-wise. The place where you are going to be is where you are best off building your networks, and that realization is quite adequately there.
Until recently, other than the IITs and then for postgrad the IIMs and places like that, we did not have a very large range of educational options at a high quality, and that has started to change as well in the last 10 years in the country.
So if you put all of those factors together—recognizing where you need to build networks, recognizing the fact that there are greater options that are available in India—when you look at universities like Ashoka, Krea, many of those universities, and they are not limiting themselves to a liberal arts education anymore. They're getting into that space of engineering. They're getting into the space of medicine.
They're getting into the space of management and many other areas as well. So the kind of options that are available there are huge. And then the third aspect is Trump. And that's helping the case of India for sure, where our elite world was thinking that it's a no-brainer to actually go to the US or to other developed countries and then continue on to have jobs there. That has shifted down.
People worry about visas and, for getting into colleges. That hasn't changed much on the ground actually, and not for the elite for sure. But what has changed well before Trump is jobs. Jobs are no longer available to our engineering graduates that go out of US universities and many other—UK for that matter.
That is a third aspect that is changing that tide. And we are seeing that already: IIT Delhi class with 83% of them year before last staying in the country.
We are already seeing that, and we are already seeing that also in the number of kids that are applying in India and still considering the US to some part because the fact is creativity and innovation, they're so way ahead of the rest of the world. Those opportunities are still there, but that is shifting for sure.
Chethan K (Host): With multiple education boards like ICSE, IGCSE, IB, Cambridge A Level, and others competing alongside state boards, how do you advise parents and students to choose the right curriculum for different aspirations?
Kavita Gupta Sabharwal (Guest): We often tell people that it's not the child, it is the parent. It's important to know yourself as a parent and what kind of education.
It's not about the curriculum, it's about your confidence. And there is something called an intergenerational contract, and that is, there are formal intergenerational contracts like social contracts and things like that, but there are also informal intergenerational ones and that parent-child relationship is one of those.
We always say that it's important that the child will often falter, particularly in the middle grades and things like that. The parent is the person who's holding the hand of the child at that time, and your hand can't falter as a parent.
The child will falter. How can you ensure that your hand is holding steady in that moment!
It's important for parents to know who they are and whether that education system their child is going to aligns with the value system that they hold and parents must think about what's best for their child, but if they can't, if their value system is at contrast with what's happening in the education of the child, that's really hard.
So it's very important to make sure as parents that the school that you're choosing, the board that you're choosing is aligning clearly with the value system that you hold so that your hand is not going be faltering.
Chethan K (Host): In that case, is technology truly helping children learn better?
Kavita Gupta Sabharwal (Guest): No, absolutely not. And not yet, I would say.
There are schools around the world like Alpha School in the US is a very famous and a very expensive school, one of the most expensive. I think it costs $75,000 a year, more than a Harvard education.
That is very hugely doing AI-based learning, diagnosing what kids do, and what kids know, and then finishing that learning in two hours so that the children are then free to do other things.
So there are models like that that exist in the world, but I believe that they leave out such a large part of what education really is and I think on a real basis, AI is not helping children, and I'm constantly arguing with our children about it.
When they go to AI and they pick up ideas from that, they're so limited, and there are so many other children that will go looking for those ideas will pick up exactly that same idea.
Technology is what this person—Sherry Turkle is a thinker about technology and neuroscience and she talks about technology as a gateway drug.
People like Daniel Kahneman have spoken about the fact that humans have a natural preference for reducing the workload and for being lazy.
In that situation today, when you're looking at children, technology is actually becoming a gateway drug for children for not adequately learning the habits of going deep, not picking up the kind of capability of having the cognitive load that's required in learning, not informing themselves adequately through reading and through language to build better thinking and better, more critical thinking, more creative thinking. I don't believe technology is helping our children. Not yet.
Chethan K (Host): So, In what ways is Neev connecting students to real-world opportunities?
Kavita Gupta Sabharwal (Guest): We do it many ways. As children grow older, we do what people would think of when you ask that question of connecting children to real-world opportunities.
They take up research projects, they do internships. There's a lot of that that the children are doing, but the real world across the scale in the school is connected many different ways.
We bring the world in significantly. We have a lot of guest speakers that come into Neev. We also bring in ideas, we bring in a lot of reading, say about technology or about politics, we bring that in.
Our curriculum is built around many of those ideas. We have an overview of learning across the years from kindergarten all the way to grade 12 and that brings in a lot of the world. When we are not bringing the world into our teaching, we are also taking the children out to the real world constantly.
We do a lot of field trips at Neev. We do learning journeys, we travel across the country. We question what does it mean to be an Indian? What does it mean to be me as a result? So there is a lot of that.
We believe schools are like a brain, you know? And I think it's like a whole neural structure, a brain, but that brain is very porous and there's movement of ideas inside and outside all the time.
As a school, that's how we operate. We are constantly taking our children out to learning. We are constantly bringing in experts, bringing in readings, bringing in ideas in there.
One of the reasons we do the Neev Literature Festival is also because of that, because the only habit in a world where lifelong learning is a requirement, the only habit that can feed that finally is reading. So there's a lot of that we bring in.
The reason we do Neev Literature Festival is if reading is a hard habit that people fight, we want to make reading cool and that's what we aim to do with the festival at school. We see that a lot. Our children are readers.
They like to access information through multiple different ways, but it's because of the way the curriculum is structured.
The IB is also a curriculum that allows you to do that, and that's why we are inherently, we are as a continuum, we are an IB school. We don't look at ourselves as an international school.
We look at ourselves as a very Indian school. There are many things that we do which sometimes surprise people. But the reason we do the IB curriculum is it's a curriculum that allows us to play. It's a curriculum that gives us the knowledge base, but it also gives us the possibility of building in these real-world projects.
For example, our grade eight right now is working on a project on the Bellandur Lake, on understanding why the challenges exist. We are doing game-based learning with them to bring in an understanding that there are multiple stakeholders and while the problem may seem so simple, the moment you bring in all these multiple stakeholders, the problems with all deferring agendas, it's not always possible to solve those problems. At the end of it, bunch of the students ask the question that if it's not really about the lake, but it becomes about power, then how do you solve that problem?
Many of these projects—at the same time, they are also preparing for a trip to Rajasthan, where they will also question development and say, how can development be felt by the people, not just as a GDP to the state because of the resources.
Many of these questions get brought in through our education all the time, and that's how we bring the real world in. Besides the internships and research opportunities and things like that which come in maybe grade nine onwards.
IB is about following an inquiry cycle and it always starts with a provocation. So if you look at the game that we had, that was a provocation.
From the provocation come questions that the children ask. From the questions, we also know that the time that you learn best is when the questions are your own, not when questions are exam questions. The time that you learn the best is when you pursue knowledge because you care about those questions, you care about the responses.
So from the provocation come the questions, from the questions come research and you following through to build knowledge. From that research comes reflection to say, what have I learned? Did I answer my questions? and goes back into that cycle of learning all the time. So that's what the idea is about.
The IB is about that inquiry cycle in many different ways, and that's always broadened through these many different ways, not just through real-world learning, but even our traditional learning is done in that inquiry cycle way.
Chethan K (Host): High-conflict family situations can deeply affect students’ wellbeing and performance. Why is it crucial for educators to be trained in managing relationships with families, and what strategies have proven most effective in your work?
Kavita Gupta Sabharwal (Guest): We don't believe it's essential to train teachers to do this because teachers are human beings and teachers are capable of conversation and communication.
So it's the same thing—it's always a conversation, and I don't believe that any one stakeholder in education matters more than the others. So it's all the stakeholders in education matter a lot.
You could possibly train educators to be more patient. You could probably train them to be listening and to be looking at what is to be solved, what is not to be solved. Then the moment you look at a varied set of parents, everyone has a very different agenda. What are you going to train teachers to do with that agenda?
If a parent wants to pursue their child as being gifted and talented, for example, or look at the other end of the spectrum that a child has counseling requirements or has learning support requirements, the requirements of those two parents is going to be so different.
A requirement of a working parent from homework versus a parent who is thinking more in that traditional mindset and wants that homework as a method of discipline is completely different. So what is a situation you have?
A teacher is a very critical bridge in that relationship between home and school and we always say that it's a golden triangle and that golden triangle is not an isosceles triangle. It's not a right-angle triangle.
It's an equilateral triangle, all three at one. At one apex of that triangle is the child, and the other two are a teacher and a parent and that golden triangle has equal pressure on all sides and all its each one of its apexes. Recognizing that there are multiple things that work.
Teachers also develop juristics over a period of time, ways of thinking on solving problems for parents. Also recognizing which problems need to be solved, which problems don't need to be solved. Which parents need support, which parents need to, you know, I think it's differentiating all of that.
The Vijayanagara Empire had a very way of thinking about this, that when you go to Hampi and we go on a grade four trip to Hampi with our children, You have the three animals in the architecture in that chariot.
There are three animals that exist. There is the horse for speed, there is the elephant for stability, and there is the lion and the tiger for courage.
You have metaphors like that in so many other cultures and so many other kingdoms in past history. I think it's really about recognizing that everything matters together to make a whole child.
What is the support that needs to happen between home and school? You can't train for this. This is just something that develops with experience. It develops with knowing children better, caring about children. So it's if we train teachers, we train them for that. We don't train them for how to talk to parents.
Chethan K (Host): You work across early childhood development, special education, international curriculum, and community impact. What foundational principles have stayed constant in your philosophy regardless of changing systems or trends?
Kavita Gupta Sabharwal (Guest): Student at the centre. Child at the centre.
The vision of Neev, the statement of our vision statement is re-imagining excellence in education in a changing India.
When you think of excellence in education, the word that comes to everyone's mind is assessment or grades, right? But that's not what excellence is about.
Excellence is about putting that child at the centre and thinking from there. Shared philosophy along that whole continuum that is Neev from early years to grade 12.
We say that children come to us at 18 months and they leave us at 18 years.
They come to us in diapers. They go out ready to make decisions about their life into the world.
In that whole continuum, for us, putting the child at the centre is what's most important, but not pandering to that child, educating that child, doing the right thing, building agency in that child, building competence in that child.
Our continuum is about in the early years, we are about exploration. So the child is exploring the world, understanding the world, developing theories about how that world operates and how they are expected to operate in that world.
In the next one, which is our primary, it becomes about awareness. We build much more knowledge now—we go away just from that child's world and we go further and further.
In the next level after that, which is the middle grades, very critical, the teen years, we are about ability. It becomes very much about the skills of the child, the ability to make decisions and succeed and learn from that, but also fail and learn from that, and at the final level, which is high school for us, for that child, it becomes about choices.
It's when the children go through this continuum that children are able to make choices that they feel comfortable with and we always say that the children don't regret the choices that they make. They will often regret the choices that we make for them.
So how can we build in them in that child from holding that child in the centre, how can we build in that child the capability of making decisions, making choices? That's what's at the core.
Through that process of making decisions, making choices, children are also surfacing their values and beliefs all the time and shaping them and they are saying that what are the decisions that align with my values and beliefs, what don't?
It's really educating that whole child for the whole world is about putting the child at the centre first and working in an age-appropriate way in that whole continuum.
Chethan K (Host): So my final question is our assessments and exams in education system evolving?
Kavita Gupta Sabharwal (Guest): A very good question. There is in the pandemic this whole thought process of assessment grading.
It's gone round over many, many years now that it's not just about should grades and assessments be there or not there, but also what kind of assessments should be there.
That also is, and I think the world is balanced on that statement. Not that grades and assessments are not required, but what kind of assessment is required and what kind of grading is appropriate is where we are.
We always say this in teaching that if you are teaching something, don't teach something if it's not worth assessing. And if it is something that you're teaching, you must assess it as well. So assessment is an ongoing process. How can you make that assessment more continuous?
How can you make that assessment more age-appropriate is the question.
You can't assess a child who's in grade one with the same methodology as a child who's in grade five, or a child who's in grade eight for that matter.
Certainly not assess a child who's in grade seven with the same methodology that you would assess a child in grade 12.
So I think in the pandemic, this came to the fore very significantly. Even in the UK there is this website called Rethinking Assessment and a lot of the world is converging on what is the best way to assess.
A lot of universities globally started saying that they are not considering SAT scores and that was hogwash. Now many of the same universities or some universities at least are starting to say that no, they're considering those assessments very much.
What other mechanism can be there for the universities to make a decision when they have a very large number of applicants?
So assessment is absolutely necessary. What kind of assessment we are doing is the question that should be asked. A lot of our Indian boards have also started shifting.
The CBSE, the ICSE has started making that shift in assessment to more project-based learning, to bringing in more multiple-choice questions and all of that.
I think we've got a long way to go on rethinking assessments because along with assessments also comes grading and correcting. And our whole system also has to get used to then doing new-age assessments.
There's a lot of work that's going on in assessments which is on the right path with the National Education Policy now.
Chethan K (Host): Thank you very much, ma'am. It was wonderful talking to you.
Kavita Gupta Sabharwal (Guest): Thank you.
